One thing we’ve definitely found different travelling with a baby is that doing huge travel days or multiple travel days in a row is not good. We really didn’t intend to spend any time in Phuket since it’s generally a lot of expensive resorts and crowded beaches, which are not our style, but we realized for our own sanity not uprooting every day would be good. So we looked in our Lonely Planet guidebook for stuff to do in the area and noticed the John Gray’s Sea Canoe was in the area, and we had seen his trip’s featured on a Thailand travel video we watched. It’s definitely more expensive than other tours in the area, but in general we’d rather pay a little more to work with tourism businesses that take sustainability, education and fair wages seriously. It was also Kim’s birthday, so we wanted to splurge and do something fun. We had a great time. We saw beautiful islands, caves, rock formations, wildlife, Thai traditions and bioluminescent plankton in the water.
We got picked up at our hostel in downtown Phuket and went to the pier NE of the city to meet up with the other tour participants. There were more people than we expected on the tour, but it was split into two boats of about a dozen people each. John Gray was not on the tour with us as we’d hoped, but certainly understand he can’t go on on every excursion. From Phuket we headed north to the limestone islands.
Our first trip out in the sea canoe (basically an open topped sea kayak) we went through a cave into a bay surrounded on all sides by limestone cliffs. Monkeys running around on the rocks greeted us. We saw a mudskipper, which is a really weird fishlike creature that uses its fins to run around out of the water in the mud. From the bay we went along the cliffs on the outer edge of the island to see all the cool rock formations and see life that clung to the walls until we met back up with our larger boat.
The next stop was in the James Bond Island, Koh Tapu. All the tours seem to come to this place, partly because it was in “The Man With the Golden Gun” film, partly because it’s cool looking. It was still pretty scenery even if completely overcrowded with tours. Here we got to swim a little and goof around in the sea canoes. Geneveve wanted to jump off the boat to me, so I had to figure out how to tread water and catch her while keeping her head above the water. It’s pretty hard, but I managed and Geneveve loved it.
On the boat we made some Kratongs, which are a slice of banana tree trunk that is decorated and floated out on the water. Our guide did most of the arts and crafts work with Geneveve, who mostly helped by pushing small nails into things we told her to. All the guides made a unique looking one that we would later
To end the day we went back to the original cave to light our kratongs and let them float, and more importantly to see the bioluminscent plankton that come out of the mangrove areas. Kim and I have seen this once before in Puerto Rico, and it’s magical. The experience was better in Puerto Rico since we got to swim in the water and there were rays that looked liked glowing ghosts swimming through the water, but splashing sparkly, glowing water on cave walls is pretty darned cool too.